Arthur Latham’s journey to parliament was a relatively conventional one for a Labour politician. Growing up in a working-class family, his father a trade unionist, Latham joined the Labour Party after the 1945 election. A councillor in Romford by 21, he rose through the ranks of local politics on Romford and later Havering Council, eventually becoming leader of the Labour Group. While personally uncomfortable with the self-promotion that came with seeking a parliamentary seat, he was selected to fight the safe Tory seat of Woodford in 1959, given the daunting task of challenging Sir Winston Churchill. In his 2014 History of Parliament oral history interview with Andrea Hertz, Latham describes the strange experience of spending a few hours with Churchill and his wife Clementine, at the election count.

While his political beginnings were similar to many Labour politicians in the post-war era, Latham’s later activism reflected the emergence of new radical energies within the party and British politics more widely. Radical movements in 1960s Britain, typified by the student protests of 1968, the campaign against the American war in Vietnam, and new social movements around feminism, black radicalism and gay rights, frequently came into conflict with Harold Wilson’s Labour government. While some activists sympathetic to these energies left the Labour Party in disillusionment, others formed grassroots pressure groups to challenge the Wilson government from within. One of these activist groups, Socialist Charter, was believed to play a direct role in securing Latham’s victory in the 1969 Paddington North by-election, his campaign reportedly bolstered by the ‘help of 200 to 300 activists’ from the group [Kogan & Kogan, 13]. From then on Latham’s career frequently intersected with the fortunes of the party’s so-called ‘hard left’. His entry into parliament was both directly helped by left-wing activists, and formed an early part of a much wider change in the House of Commons’ factional composition.

Latham’s election was part of  an influx of new left-wing Labour MPs, mostly coalescing around the Tribune Group, a faction within the Parliamentary Labour Party founded in the early 1960s by  supporters of left-wing newspaper Tribune,  which had grown significantly towards the end of the 1970s.  Further, this new generation were considered far more willing to rebel, even if it meant defeating the government on the floor of the Commons. A self-described ‘rebel in the House’ and considered by others ‘a thorn in the side’ of the 1974-79 government, Latham became chairman of the Tribune Group in November 1975, then at the height of its rebelliousness [Telegraph, 22 Dec. 2016].

While Latham was prepared to often be a lonely minority on matters of principle, there were some major disagreements between the government and backbench MPs during his time in Parliament. This was revealed through the whipping system, which privileged the top-down leadership of the government, rather than the collective view of the parliamentary party. This was in complete contrast to Latham’s experience of local government decision-making and was illustrated particularly clearly when it came to parliamentary votes on joining the European Common Market. 

Latham’s frustration reflected the growing disconnect between the Labour government and its backbenches, and anticipated the internal divisions that would plague the party into the 1980s. Yet there were still limits to the Tribune Group’s rebelliousness. Latham describes how the group had to strike a ‘delicate balance’ between exerting pressure on the government without bringing it down entirely. At times, this meant that the Tribune Group was mobilised to support the government rather than rebel against it.

The period not only saw conflict between the Labour government and backbench MPs, but also a ‘crisis of legitimacy’ [Randall, 215] between the party’s parliamentary leadership and its grassroots membership. Once again Latham played a part in this internal conflict.

In June 1973, the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy (CLPD) was formed. Made up largely of former Socialist Charter members, the pressure group was launched in reaction to Harold Wilson’s vetoing of radical policies endorsed by party conference. To ensure similar such flagrant rebuffs of conference sovereignty did not happen again, CLPD advocated a series of major reforms to the party’s constitution, ensuring that the party’s parliamentary elites were more accountable to the grassroots membership. This included making it mandatory for incumbent MPs to go through a re-selection process, and widening the franchise for the election of party leader to include ordinary members and trade unionists, as well as MPs. It was Latham who booked the room in the House of Commons where CLPD met for the first time. In this small act he played an early facilitating role in the formation of a campaign that would eventually achieve major changes in Labour’s constitution, decisively altering the relationship between the party’s grassroots membership and its parliamentary elites.

Latham’s career  reflected a wider reconceptualization of what an MP’s role could be. The new generation of left-wing MPs were not only less deferential to the party leadership, but also ascribed greater importance to activism outside parliament. Latham spent little time in the Commons chamber and made few speeches, describing it in the 2014 interview as ‘not a good investment of time’. Instead, he was ‘extremely busy’ outside, both with constituency work and in supporting extra-parliamentary movements. A lifelong peace activist, Latham was a member of the British Campaign for Peace in Vietnam, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Movement for Colonial Freedom. In 1977 Latham was elected Executive Chair of the Greater London Labour Party. While ostensibly an administrative position, his election again reflected a wider shift to the left in London politics, which culminated in Ken Livingstone’s radical administration on the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 to 1986. Latham returned to local government himself in 1986 and became leader of Havering Council in 1990. He would eventually briefly resign from the Labour Party in response to the Iraq War, once again reflecting a common experience of left-wing disillusionment within the party, and a period of dramatic decline in the party’s membership.

Arthur Latham’s career was therefore frequently a bellwether for the progress of Labour’s ‘hard left’ from the 1960s onwards. His parliamentary career intersected the left’s rise in influence and his later trajectory frequently emulated the experience of other left-wing activists across the country. Studying the political activism of Arthur Latham provides not only an enlightening insight into the experience of a committed left-wing politician, but also reveals the contours of much wider political changes in Britain in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

A.S.

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Further reading
David Kogan and Maurice Kogan, The Battle for the Labour Party second edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Ken Livingstone, If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It (London: Collins, 1987).

Hugh Pemberton and Mark Wickham-Jones, ‘Labour’s Lost Grassroots: The Rise and Fall of Party Membership’, British Politics 8:2 (2013), pp.181-206.

Nick Randall, ‘Dissent in the Parliamentary Labour Party, 1945-2015’ in Emannuel Avril and Yann Béliard (eds.), Labour United and Divided from the 1830s to the Present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), pp.193-220.

John E. Schwarz, ‘Attempting to Assert the Commons’ Power: Labour Members in the House of Commons, 1974-1979’, Comparative Politics 14:1 (1981), pp.17-29.

Rhiannon Vickers, ‘Harold Wilson, the British Labour Party, and the War in Vietnam’, Journal of Cold War Studies 10:2 (2008), pp.41-70.

With access to the British Library sound archive still unavailable, a full catalogue of our oral history project and details with how to access interviews is available on our website. 

Find more blogs from our oral history project here.

Alfie Steer is a historian of modern and contemporary Britain, currently studying for a DPhil at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the history of the Labour Left from the end of the miners strike to Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015. His most recent article was published in Contemporary British History, and has written book reviews for Twentieth Century British History and the English Historical Review. Outside of academia he has written for popular publications such as Tribune.

As Westminster returns to work after the summer recess, MPs must become accustomed to an environment which few living parliamentarians have experienced—a House of Commons with a minority government.

There have been limited instances of minority government in the UK Parliament since WWII. When John Major lost his majority in 1997 he only had three months to survive until it was time to fight a general election.

It was during the period 1974-79 that the tensions and challenges posed by the lack of a governing majority became routine for those MPs who belonged to the House of Commons at that time.

Heath failed to form a coalition after the election in February 1974, leaving Labour to snatch their opportunity to take power, albeit by forming a minority government. Harold Wilson then called a second election in October 1974 which returned a majority of three.

However by April 1976—shortly after Callaghan had replaced Wilson as Labour party leader—any minimal advantage had slipped out of Labour’s grasp through a combination of by-election defeats and the defection of backbenchers to other parties.

Callaghan’s government survived due to the failure of opposition parties to unite against them, and the formation of a Lib-Lab pact in March 1977 that effectively saw off a vote of no confidence and lasted until speculation in mid-1978 suggested that a general election would soon be called.

A recent report from the Hansard Society outlines how our current Parliament may operate in the context of a minority government.

• Bills may be presented in skeleton form, leaving the details to be filled in through delegated or secondary legislation which is barely scrutinised by Parliament.
• The conduct and character of Select Committees in this situation is uncharted territory, as the system only developed after 1979.
• The usual channels may come under increasing strain and the business managers—particularly the Chief Whip—will be key figures in the government, needing to take greater account of the needs and demands of the smaller parties upon whose votes they may need to rely.

That was exactly the case in 1974-79. When the margins are tight, every vote on every side counts and securing those votes is the job of the whips.

MPs who served in the 1974-79 Parliament and have been interviewed for our oral history project remember it as a testing yet exciting period, giving an indication of what minority government could mean for our current crop of parliamentarians.

Ann Taylor (Labour) relished the challenges of her job at that time in the Government’s Whips’ Office, describing the atmosphere as tense, exhilarating and one of great camaraderie.

Fred Silvester (Conservative) was an Opposition Whip and relates how his office kept track of information about MPs that they might need to use when persuading MPs to vote.

It was when the pairing system broke down in May 1976 that life became very difficult for the Whips and MPs. Helene Hayman (Labour) recalls what sparked the crisis.

The night before Whitsun recess was that much disputed vote when the Labour Whips were accused—this is all in This House—of fiddling the vote and Michael Heseltine was so enraged that he picked up the mace and swung it round and all hell broke out.

What it meant for MPs was that they were tied to the House unless there were exceptional circumstances such as when Hayman, six months pregnant at the time, was paired with Margaret Thatcher to the great displeasure of the whips (as reflected in the language used in this clip!)

Roger Sims (Conservative) recounts how as a new MP he was introduced to the whipping system by the Chief Whip and what happened when he missed a vote by a matter of seconds.

Robert Hughes (Labour) remembers staying ridiculously late into the early hours, at a time when all-night sittings were not unusual and tiredness made him operate on autopilot:

We lived in Hampstead, and I always had to take the dog for a walk when I came home, and I came home about half past three one morning, took the dog for a walk, got back and my wife said “Where the hell have you been?” I said, “walking the dog”. She said: “you walked the dog’s lead, you left the dog at home!”

MPs were also constrained from voting how they wished, as Labour’s Ken Weetch described:

When we won in October ‘74, I mean it was very, very thin indeed, I’ve forgot the actual number but I know we weren’t at all safe. We were very shaky […] you had to have tight discipline and there were things that I should have done which I didn’t do. For example we passed docks legislation and we gave the dockers’ trade unions a monopoly of dock work. I should have resisted that because it was a bad piece of legislation – but we were told we either supported it or we fell. You know I mean it was literally that.

Their role as an MP became reduced to their ability to pass through the division lobby, as Bruce Grocott (Labour) found.

Halfway through that Parliament I got peritonitis and was sort of whipped into hospital in the middle of the night and never has the media shown, prior or since, remotely comparable levels of interest in my health or my availability to turn up in Parliament. I mean that was the main thing, I mean I was a vote that couldn’t take place.

Frank White (Labour), an Opposition Whip, describes Callaghan’s decision in 1979 not to call the critically-ill Doc Broughton to Westminster, resulting in the loss of the vote of no confidence which forced the general election.

In the subsequent election defeat Frank Judd (Labour) lost his ministerial office and his constituency yet his immediate reaction among friends was one of joy. “They all looked at me with their jaws open [because] I started singing. And I sang and sang and sang. And what was this? It was somehow a feeling of relief that an impossible situation had gone.”

EL